During co-editing in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or OneNote in Office Online, an Office 365 tenant may request the disabling of the chat feature that's described at Office Online—chat with your co-editors in real-time for their whole tenant. To disable this chat feature tenant-wide, the Office 365 administrator must submit a support request to Microsoft. There is no capability to disable chat for a subset of the tenant.
Important
Even when the chat feature is turned on in Office Online, the chat history is not saved. This may be of concern to some organizations.
Note for Office 365 administrators and local data residency required tenants:
If the SharePoint datacenter is in one of the listed Office 365 geographical data residency regions, the chat feature is not available. To determine the SharePoint datacenter location, follow these steps:
- Locate Microsoft 365 admin center > Settings > Organization Profile.
- Scroll down to view Data location.
Update
As of October 31, 2018, the doc chat feature has been enabled for Canadian and Australian datacenters. The chat feature remains unavailable for the other previously referenced local residency regions.